Sem 04 / Form and Space Studies
Studies & Design of Building Types in Historic Clusters
Rupali Gupte
with Prasad Khanolkar, Samir Raut, and Tushar Rajkumar
and Teaching Assistants: Manish Shravane and Rushikesh Hirulkar
The course helps students to identify architectural type in a specific context that has emerged from exigencies of climate, culture and life force and to work with the type to address contemporary needs, paying attention to behavioural affordances and experiences that their proposed interventions generate. The studio continues to address the crucial finding in the Education Research undertaken at SEA which states that 95% people in India do not get the services of architects (Shetty et al 2025).
This year the studio studied a settlement in Palghar district in the village of Makunsar for its house type and morphological structure. The demographics of the village show that more than 75% of the population is aged and is above the age of 65 years. This is also a place where people are choosing to retire. The studies of the settlement conducted by students showed a unique morphological structure that was able to retain a sense of social cohesion where people looked out for each other. The house type was conducive to the lives of the elderly who often lived by themselves and chose to spend a large part of their day outdoors, in the verandah, in the company of others their age. In contrast the new houses being built in the village, by people returning to the village are built on agricultural land and are new ‘bungalow types’ that create an insular life. People soon realise that these house types are out of sync with their lives.
Further, emerging patterns of development in the village show villagers getting together to amalgamate land to build common infrastructure like tourist facilities for future growth. Taking advantage of these initiatives, this studio proposes an old age home, asking the students what it would mean to study the house types and morphology of the village and come up with a design for a contemporary home for the elderly in a site in the village.
Students went through a rigorous process of studying the existing settlement structure, and diagramming the clusters of houses and their morphology and house types and in turn proposed a facility for 20 - 24 elderly residents. They studied existing spatio-formal configurations and their relationships with behaviour, experiences, and life-practices, in order to reconfigure them towards a new spatial proposition for an old age home through an articulation of scale, proportions, light, and materials. They were asked to design a contemporary institution as a house for the elderly by producing a new type that would respond to the program's experiential requirements of expanses, intimacies, personal-private-public and its connection to life and practise.